Dan Wang

I just come back to there is literally no re-- I mean, again, my China reading, every model has to be registered and evaluated by the Chinese government.

The Chinese government itself, I encourage everybody to go read Dan Wang's book.

To the extent that the CCP and the-- is a soc-- that China is a society of elites.

Its elites are engineers.

I'm not fully certain where we are in the current cycle, but we're probably not at the top.

There's a great book by Dan Wang about China, comparing China and America.

And his basic thesis is that China is run entirely by engineers and America is run entirely by lawyers.

And even though you have a few breakout companies in the States, the giants, and it's a very entrepreneurial place, by and large, it's being hampered by the lawyers.

It's therefore very easy for those identities to end up anchored to an external status hierarchy, especially for the many students who go into a lot of debt to attend college and are relying on their newfound class privilege to make that choice financially worthwhile.

Dan Wang has a very compelling blog post on the resulting Girardian terror, which I'll quote at length.

Quote.

It's hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus.

I mean, Democrats for better, well, and worse, really for worse, have become associated with inefficient allocation of resources, not paying enough attention to getting banged for your buck, and being super attentive to the dictates and procedural constraints that are now embedded in our laws and in a lot of the infrastructure that surrounds policymaking like NGOs and so on.

As Dan Wang memorably put it, the industrial policy in the United States is industrial policy as devised by the Yale Law School.

So that's not a good idea.

And it hasn't worked out too well.

Entire subway systems, high-speed rail, cities that seem to appear almost overnight.

Economist Dan Wang has spent years thinking about what makes China so good at this.

He's the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.

And one of the places that helped him understand it was one of China's poorest provinces, which he decided to cross on a bicycle.

From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, a show about the people making and breaking our digital world.

I'm Dina Temple-Raston.

Dan Wang has a theory about why China builds the way it does.

Basically, he thinks it comes down to who's in charge.

So I think that we have the power to build up.

So, uh, Dan Wang and I wrote a piece for the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago suggesting that this was, uh, you know, that these people were like, uh, they came from a Philip K. Dick dystopia.

And so we suggested that, uh, what we need to do is not to focus on the vast dreams that they have, but to focus on the communities around them, to focus on the ways that they can build up structures.

And this has happened before.

So you are, you've come to the right place, because we have three terrific people to talk to us about all of this.

Dan Wang has written probably the best book on China recently.

Julian Gewirtz was in the Biden administration, in the, the Biden White House, and has written two great books on China.

Um, Julian is a late bloomer.

Thank you so much.

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Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Prior to this, he was a fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.